Thursday 24 March 2011 13.11 EDT
First published on Thursday 24 March 2011 13.11 EDT

Tony Hirst, an Open University lecturer in computer science, has won a £1,000 prize and access to a £50,000 development fund from The Stationery Office for his proposal to create an open data project using the UCAS Course Search data to help would-be students compare and contrast universities, courses and results more easily.

Hirst was awarded on Wednesday night, in the TSO's first OpenUp competition. The number of people who could benefit from the idea – which would mash up all sorts of data from universities, such as courses, fees, subsequent employment data, and so on – is presently 600,000, who apply for university courses each year; 500,000 places are awarded.

And the reason nobody has done this before – despite the existence of sites such as hotcourses – is that UCAS keeps its data rather close to its chest. And that got the judges interested in wresting that data away: after all, universities are public bodies, at least partly publicly funded, and so this is data the public should have free access to. And the universities would benefit too from an open market of information about their achievements.

Hirst proposes creating a "scaffold" of data, using each course code as a unique identifier. Course codes do work in that way – but there's no rhyme or reason to how they're allocated. There's also a "secret sauce" of search terms that each course is linked to when you use the UCAS site. The trouble for anyone wanting to generate a UCAS-like site is that the universities don't give the data out. And as for scraping – if it could be scraped, Hirst would already have done it, as he's an expert in data mashing (you'll find many of his examples on his OUseful blog).

Hirst has already blogged about his win (you can see the trophy) and we've asked him to blog at greater length here about his idea.

The runner-up – chosen after great amounts of debate, because we (the judges, of which I was one) thought its importance was presented in a compelling way - was the Great British Public Toilet Map by Gail Knight.

Sure, some people might snigger (it's a British thing) at the idea that you might want to know where a toilet is. But as Knight pointed out, to elderly people or people with irritable bowel syndrome or other afflictions, knowing you'll be able to find a toilet isn't just about discomfort; and not knowing can mean they circumscribe their lives.

Yet public toilets' locations is data that is held by local councils (parishes, city councils, district councils), they're obliged to provide them, they're paid for with taxpayers' money, and there would be a huge public benefit in opening them up. The trouble is that hardly any councils publish that data. We will feature a blogpost from Knight here soon.

So we hope now that both projects will go ahead. Yes, there are public toilet apps, but they don't use the council data, because that doesn't always exist. And there are sites which offer data about courses, but they're incomplete. Generating public benefit from open data is the target: and these projects, we hope, will be the arrows that hit it.

I was one of the judges (because it's about open data, and I'm co-founder along with Michael Cross of the Free Our Data campaign); the other (more exalted) judges were Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton, most frequently seen at the side of Sir Tim Berners-Lee as they try to get central and local government to open up data; Emma Mulqueeny, founder of Rewired State (and now a Guardian developer); Lucian Hudson, who was the UK government's first director of e-communications; Ashley Friedlein, chief executive and founder of Econsultancy.com; and helping it along Robin Brattel of TSO.